Tuesday, August 10, 2010

Coimbatore to become an e-district soon

Coimbatore will soon become an “e-district” with select services of four departments going online initially.

Tamil Nadu E-governance Agency Director Santhosh Babu told The Hindu that Coimbatore was one of the six districts that would come under e-governance in the State soon. Revenue, Adi Dravida and Tribal Welfare, Backward Classes, Most Backward Classes and Minority Welfare and Social Welfare departments would be covered under the project.

The public could go to common service centres, internet browsing centres or use the computer at home to get various certificates such as birth, death, nativity and community, with a digital signature of the official concerned. For every three villages, one common service centre would be established on the public private partnership mode.

Mr. Babu said the objective was to make the public “feel the Government and not to see it”. E-governance would help the public on two fronts: information and services. Information was already available online on various schemes and projects. With the e-district project, the services would also be available online. The Government proposed to launch M-Governance (information available through mobile phones) soon. Project cost for Coimbatore for the e-district was about Rs. 2 crore. Computer applications for these were ready and in Coimbatore, the required hardware was also procured. The entire Revenue Department here, extending up to the Village Administrative Officers, would have computers with connectivity. In the Adi Dravidar, Backward and Social Welfare Departments, the public would be able to submit their applications online to get the benefits.

“The year 2010 is a watershed year for the State's e-governance initiatives as several related projects are going on,” he said. For instance, a State portal would be launched by next January. The Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu was working on a State data centre and it would be ready in another three months, he said.